It Ain't Over Easy
by ForASecondThereWe'dWon
Summary: 1940s AU. Private eye Jughead Jones is hired to investigate threatening letters received by a member of the Riverdale Ladies' Book Club. Arriving on the scene, he finds the women even tougher to read than the literature, especially when a certain blonde provides quite the distraction from his case. Will justice prevail? He'll get there somehow, even if "It Ain't Over Easy!"


**Author's Note:**

Something _very_ different for me: a 1940s AU! I've written this story as a contribution to the Bughead Investigates! collection, facilitated by the Bughead Family Discord on Tumblr. The theme is "in strange places," and the prompt I worked from was "book club." This is the story that concept turned into.

Enjoy!

XO ForASecondThereWe'dWon

* * *

Maybe it was the hat that made people stare. Maybe it was the way I ordered two coffees at once, then tugged the waiter's sleeve and said 'Keep 'em comin'.' Maybe it was the fact that, despite these eccentricities, I was so regular in this town. Not regular the way a fellow's regular at a diner (though I was that), but regular because I didn't carry a gun in my pocket, or under my jacket, or in my left shoe or wherever the hell else the good people of this community were stashing their negotiators these days. What my town once was, the Riverdale of my childhood, was long gone. It was like the stories in the movies where the hero dies in his lover's arms or the bad guys get away―sad, then immediately forgotten. Maybe it was just that I watched a lot of movies. The Bijou was about the only thing worth a damn around here. That and Pop's, where I was eating my breakfast, getting gawped at, and drinking enough coffee to lay my jittery hands on the greasy floor and rouse a little sympathy for the Europeans by re-enacting a bombing tremor. But maybe '46 was too early to try that sort of stunt. I paid up and shivered my way out the door.

Sun was out but a curtain of rain washed over, just getting my shoes. I was 29, but I'd been told I looked younger and older. Mostly depending on how the girl was feeling when she said it. Not tall, not fat, not bearded because I wasn't some kind of bum, though I wasn't police either. That was how I'd got the job I was headed to. Everybody loves a private eye. And when I say everybody, I mean nobody, but it sweetens the client to feel they own you in a way, since you're working on their dime. About the only job in the world where somebody sweetens by handing out money instead of raking it in. What it paid was enough to fuel me from Pop's to the Pembrooke, the nicest apartment building in Riverdale. I didn't know if the plumbing worked any better here than anyplace else, but the staff certainly did. An older man with the speck-free suit of a fastidious employer stepped out the door before I could get there and held it open for me.

"Nifty," I complimented with a conspiratorial grin that I knew he wouldn't appreciate.

"You are Detective Jones, sir?" He stood there in the lobby with hands clasped at his back. I wanted to tell him the war was over, to stand at ease, maybe slap his face a couple times to bring some colour into it.

"Jellybean Jones," I boldly proclaimed. His face did not change. It was marvelous. "I'm kidding, pal. Jellybean's my sister. What a name, right? Mine's Jughead."

He stepped behind a desk and scratched a few things across a page. They were probably not very nice things.

"I shall inform Miss Veronica you have arrived, sir," he told me, immediately picking up the glossy receiver with cotton-gloved paws and announcing my presence to a woman who could only possibly live on the top floor.

Given the go-ahead, I crossed to an elevator that looked like a giant gold bar with a seam down the middle like the seat of a pair of pants; I almost had to look away when it opened due to an over-imaginative terror of seeing its underwear.

"What do they call you?" I hollered back to the desk of the manservant, a thing one is distinctly not supposed to do in a fancy hotel.

"Smithers, sir," he obliged me.

"Smithers, why don't you step outside and catch some sun? Your swell little heiress will be safe with me."

"I think I'd better not, sir."

The closing elevator doors, those overgrown paperweights, didn't give me a chance to play with my new friend any longer.

The ride up made me a little sick, though it wasn't many floors. That's what happened when you lived in a town with a lot of squat buildings like mashed-down sandwiches that the people leaked from like mustard. I don't mean to say they were yellow. No, Riverdale was not a town of cowards. Today's penthouse millionaire was the type of client who has no need to be afraid because they aren't actually the one in trouble, just looking out for a friend. With women, that's usually code for being on the scene in case something exciting happens, then telephoning it around to neighbours and out-of-town, gossipy aunts. I'd see what I could do today to pad 'Miss Veronica's' next telephone call.

She opened the heavy door of the apartment when I knocked and my eyebrows floated off like foolish kites, forgetting they'd be stopped by the low-hanging branch that was the part of my hair which always fell down out of my hat. Hers was a killer face, features dark and sexy. I knew just by looking that they could distract a fellow in the street so that he dropped right down an open manhole.

"Miss Veronica?"

"Mrs. Andrews," she corrected, extending a slender arm to shake hands like a commoner. That wasn't anything she'd learned up here in her ivory tower.

"My mistake," I owned. "Old Smithers played me dirty. Never trust a valet," I counseled as I stepped into her apartment. It opened up behind her like a shot man.

"Butler, actually. Not quite so intimate. My husband insists on taking care of our personal affairs himself." She smiled up at me from way down below; not a tall woman.

"Well, you've got to learn to tie your own shoes eventually."

The mistress of the house laughed, which was a surprise. Kinda put me in a mood to be disagreeable.

"Can I take your hat, Detective Jones?"

I raised one hand and jammed the thing down tighter.

"He's paid up," I explained, giving her a shrug. "That means nobody can throw him out of the penthouse."

"Who's getting thrown out?"

I looked around to see a startling redheaded woman approaching slyly along the wall. Her grin scared me, like it was the grill of a car I was seeing too close, about to be run over. A real vixen, no question. It was my instinct not to answer her; the lady to my left with hair like a wet road didn't say anything either.

"Excuse the rusticity of our setup here, Detective," Veronica begged, practically pushing me into the room while the woman in red slipped away from the wall like dripping blood, staining the armchair she dropped into. "This week is our first at the Pembrooke."

I took a long steady look around, like my eyes watched an unravelling thread. Expensive furniture and a rug deep enough to lay back in and float cherub-like weren't my idea of rustic. A couple of the gals sat on large pillows on the floor, like prize cats. I guessed fine treatment for cats was an embarrassment for humans, but they did look pretty comfortable. There were six of them all together―humans that was, not cats, all of the female variety―making up the Riverdale Ladies' Book Club. An even number, but there was plenty odd about this bunch. More than one sat like I was taking their photograph, the unnaturalness of it making me want to back out.

"Sometimes the best way to do a thing is roughly," I replied, reaching into my coat and fiddling my suspender like I was slapping the string of a bass while I considered flopping belly-down onto the rug and commencing to swim laps. A lady of startling green eyes gave me an offended look like I'd taken a swat at her backside. Seemed as though she was speaking double with me, knew the dirty dance I was doing and elected to skirt the ballroom. "Tell me more about your club, Mrs. Andrews," I said, delightful as a canary in this room full of cats. She waved me to take the chair that had evidently been hers and squeezed in next to another girl.

"Well, it's not mine, actually, it's Ethel's." She indicated a woman whose face would've been pretty if not for the look in her eyes. "Ethel?"

"Ethel Muggs," she introduced herself, getting over the irritated look of a child in church clothes that she had worn when I mistakenly gave credit to the wrong woman; I could've flipped a coin on whether or not that was wholly my doing. I didn't know how they got along with the books, but these ladies were tough enough reading to leave a fellow stammering in class and sent home with scarlet, corrected knuckles.

"Jughead Jones," I answered, touching my palm to my chest like some kind of streetwise Romeo and glancing around at the gang so I could count that introduction as the one and only I was going to make.

"We started it during the war, running once a week, same as now," Ethel continued, short hair springy like the busted part of my favourite chair that was always poking into my leg. "Not all of us at first. Veronica joined when she moved here. And we've only had Betty this past month."

My gaze was drawn even without the founder's direction. Betty. The only blonde in the room. As far as I knew, the only blonde in Riverdale at that moment. Round eyes, round face, round lower down than that and rounding on _me_ with reproach when I started to stare.

"We've been lucky, able to scrounge up copies of whichever book we decided to read, and then swap them around if there weren't enough. Helped us do the thing cheaply. It's been really nice to… to take our minds off things."

"And what's this you're reading now?"

I rose and stepped up to the table in the middle of all these legs crossed high and low―depending on how much the woman wanted to show me she wasn't scared of some private dick―and twirled the book sitting on it so I could read the title right-way up. _Rebecca_.

"Have you read it, Mr. Jones?" the one called Betty asked with something in her eye that might have been my future through a green stained-glass window, had the light been streaking into the room at the right angle.

"Not myself, no. Murder, jealousy, escaping the past, a woman overshadowed," I listed, becoming grander way up close to God in this high-rise. "Not my particular brand of brain fuel. 'She dreams a little, and she feels the dark/Encroachment of that old catastrophe.'"

"Wallace Stevens," came the soft yet sure voice of the green-eyed lady.

I nodded in praiseful acknowledgement, but she wasn't looking at me; she was looking far away, not in space, but in time, I guessed. Perhaps these wealthy Andrews had a time machine handy in which I could follow the woman. She exhaled further words: "'There are things of which I may not speak;/There are dreams that cannot die.'"

I stood as still as the moon stands in the sky, only swinging around the Earth when we aren't looking. I might not even have breathed―and that's a favourite pastime of mine. The room was under her spell.

"Longfellow," she cited eventually, blinking up at me, when the match scratching against my brain wouldn't light.

"Well, sure," I said, positively unnerved.

"Valerie Brown," she told me. I touched my hat to greet her, and to make sure all the important parts of me were still there. Then I rotated jarringly like the hand of a temperamental but favourite old clock to a woman who had not yet spoken.

"Excuse me, ma'am," I said, like the gentleman I wasn't, "but your face is too familiar for me to keep my mouth shut. Are you Josie McCoy?"

A glance went from this woman to the last which was as inscrutable to me as the mysteries of the pyramids were to a common grey rat.

"Josephine, now that I don't have to worry about all those letters fitting on a poster." She gave me a quiet but proud smile.

"A thrill, no matter how much of the alphabet you're putting to work," I assured the famed wartime singer with a partial bow. "I would be blown straight off my feet if the carpet weren't dense enough to hold me up," I commented, soaking my compliment like a fresh butterfly as I inadvertently insulted the lady of the house.

"My husband tells me it's quite supportive," Mrs. Veronica Andrews cut in, giving the butterfly a firm shake and standing it on its hair-fine legs, "on his back. We've made love on it several times. Most recently, right where you're standing."

I lifted and inspected one foot, as if some sordid clue remained.

"Oh, I _so_ prefer this to discussing a book," said the lady red as paint on a barn from her chair. "Cheryl Blossom," I was informed before I could ask. "But let's slice directly to the heart of the mystery, shall we? We've hired a detective, not a pornographer, isn't that right?"

I witnessed Josie McCoy press gloved fingers to her temple. Somehow, someway, I believed this Cheryl character was as much a trial during regular meetings as she was winding up to be today. And somebody was gonna have to catch that pitch.

"Not for a lack of offers," I teased with a heartless smirk. "You'd be surprised the number of dames who'd like to see themselves immortalized in the great medium of smutty photographs. Profitable gig, if I were the kind of scum who ran a dirty business on the side."

"So you're honest," Veronica confirmed, seeming amused like a kid who thinks they know something you don't. Maybe she did.

"As footprints in the snow."

"Didn't anyone ever try to buy you?" she prodded again. I moved my shoulder up and elbow out, searching for a convenient slab of some sort of furnishing that did not materialize under my arm, leaving me jerking like an ill-made marionette before I dropped the arm again.

"Did anyone ever try to buy _you?_ "

"Oh sure, he was a St. Clair. A New York St. Clair," she added with dangerous emphasis, dark eyebrows sweeping down like a flapping hawk. So I was to comprehend that she was upright like me. That was one I wouldn't put so much as a deposit on without a sleep and a think.

"I've always preferred fritters myself. Hate all that mushy cream in the middle," I replied, keeping my face flat as a window washer with poor balance as I made myself intolerable.

"There are plenty of places to go in this town if I wanted to have idiocy poured into my ears like cement," Cheryl chastised. "Ethel, tell the dick your ludicrous story and be done with it."

"It isn't a story!" The girl was up on her feet with the power and swiftness of a kangaroo. I wondered if she could box like one. She sat just as hastily then twisted in her seat and looked hard at me as though I'd walked in and released her troubles like a loose fist on a clump of balloon strings.

"Tell it to me, Muggsy," I coaxed. I could see how hard Ethel was working to stay even as calm as she was, and I didn't want that. Only the sting of alcohol will clean a wound. Only a generous splash will make the foamy bubbles rise to the top. She was good and irritated now.

"You had better take me seriously!"

"I'm listening," I soothed, though it was clear she would've gone on without encouragement.

"I've been getting these notes with newsprint letters―"

"When?"

"Mondays, for the past, oh, month and a half."

"So you'll be expecting another tomorrow," I pondered. "Threatening?"

"Yes."

"Regarding what? Your job, your home, your person?"

"Nothing very specific…"

"You could have done better than that," said Cheryl. She spat sarcasm like a squeezed lemon. "I think you've lost your touch, Ethel."

"What's she mean?" I asked, pointing at Blossom but staring at Muggs. Dear Muggsy didn't like to meet my eye.

"Years ago―"

"Not so very many," Cheryl countered. Ethel received that remark like a love letter full of cuss words, ire like a varnish over her eyeballs.

"I… sent letters to Miss Blossom here."

"Not missives of friendship, I take it."

"No," she confessed, "but I was only a jealous kid. I would never have done anything worse."

"Or you never had the opportunity to," Cheryl suggested. I held up a hand.

"So the way you figure it, Ethel," I summarized, "is that whoever's sending you these notes knows about your past harassment of Cheryl." Now, a real professional wouldn't have said 'harassment,' but professionalism does not hold my interest any more than a one-man tennis match. Ethel glanced at me like I'd waltzed across her foot.

"Not just that, Detective. I think the sender is a member of this book club."

"Why bother accusing someone of making you out to be crazy and a liar when you're perfectly capable of doing that yourself?" Cheryl wondered aloud. You kind of had to admire her frankness.

"Each of the notes reference the books we've been reading."

"And the change in the meeting location?" I asked, shooting a darting glance at Veronica Andrews.

"Ethel feared she was being followed. The Pembrooke is in a safer neighbourhood than hers, with security available at all times," the permanent tenant explained.

"Why not quit the club?"

"I belong here," Ethel said. "It's _my_ club. I formed it and I won't be forced out."

"Of _course_ you won't be," vowed Betty adamantly, reaching to pat the other woman's arm. All that meant to me was another view of a lovely figure. I felt like an artist, watching some wild thing out in nature and capturing it in a series of rough field sketches, only I'd lost my pencil. I cleared my throat.

"Betty, why don't you step into the next room with me? I'd be awfully useful to hear the insights of someone who's joined the club so recently. You had no previous knowledge of the exchange between Ethel and Cheryl, I assume?"

"That's correct," she said, already rising. "I'd be happy to help, Detective Jones." I breathed like I was at the summit of Everest itself at the sight of those legs.

"No harm in carrying on with your meeting," I tossed out to the rest of them.

"Absolutely," Josie piped up, high smooth voice spreading like thick icing on a cake.

"That's not just _your_ decision," I heard Valerie remind her.

Unfortunately, my ears lifted away from that conversation like a needle from a played record. I was escorting a beautiful woman to our own private realm, my hand on her back the second we turned a corner. One of us was standing too close, and since there only were the two of us, that meant both of us were standing too close. I thought it looked like kissing distance and when I leaned over her, lo and behold, it was. Betty sighed a little, hands creeping under my jacket like a pair of velvet-footed burglars. Her fingernails lined the inner edge of my suspenders and I was a goner, wrapping her up in my arms the way a thick diamond collar wraps the Queen's neck.

"Juggy," she breathed against my lips when I gave her a little space, "we're working."

She was a great kisser, a great partner, a great spy… and she was my wife.

"We sure are, honey. I'm so excited I could just―"

Her hand clamped over my mouth.

"We will not wreck this today. What do you want? For my mother to quit passing us tips when she hears things?"

"It's in her favour to do so, and you know it," I argued, keeping my voice turned down. "The work we do after getting Alice's 'tips' make a bigger story in the end, which sells more of her papers."

"And _our_ business would shutter if she didn't whisper our names in the right ears."

"Ok," I conceded. "We've all got an angle."

"I've put a month of time into this," Betty warned me, like the kick she'd give me in the night if I tugged her blankets away.

"Don't act like it's such a hardship. Your assignment, essentially, was _reading_. If only I were as lucky as you, the next gig would let me catch a bad guy by eating burgers all day at Pop's."

"You poor thing," she said with highly unsympathetic eyes. I'd drown my sorrows at her lack of compassion in a chocolate milkshake when this was over.

"Alright," I finally prompted, resting a forearm against the wall beside her and working up a jaunty lean like a brat works a hard wad of gum into a chew, "what's going on in there? Those gals are doing some kind of bee dance with their communications, and I'm no bee."

"Do you have a preference as to where I start?" Betty asked. Those round green eyes were like Swiss hills and I wanted to roll around in them. She flicked my hat to get my attention.

"Wherever you like."

"The trouble that should've been most obvious to you is between Ethel and Cheryl. A few too many times of Ethel seeing Cheryl win and never lose. Ethel's also a little chilly with Veronica for the same reason, plus bad business between their fathers that was shared with me when the opulence of our new setting stirred up old memories of where Veronica got her wealth."

"Not the husband's money then."

"Not mostly."

"If Cheryl―and maybe Veronica too, since we let her have the impression that she hired me―believes that Ethel's off her nut, making all this up, how is it she manages to be so brazen? Isn't there any worry that Ethel's returned to past bad habits, but may take things future this time?"

"Well, Veronica's like a queen in her castle here. And the husband's no slouch about coming to her rescue, from what I've heard."

"Is that admiration in your voice, Betty?" My mouth set hard like it always did when envy was crawling up my pant leg and nipping me where it hurts.

"Keep your imagination on the case, Juggy," she counseled with a shake of that gorgeous blonde head, which was enough to relax my trepidations the way a gentle scratch behind the ears relaxes an old dog.

"Then dish, doll. Why doesn't Cheryl quake where she sits? A little loony herself, perhaps?" I had my suspicions.

"She has Toni now for protection and can afford not to take Ethel seriously. Apparently Cheryl hasn't shown fear since 1933."

"Gee," I cracked. "She should've been a general. This Tony guy must be quite a champ."

Betty's lips parted faster than the folds of an alcoholic's wallet at a bar, but she didn't say whatever she'd intended to. I could get more from her eyes in an instant that that roomful of women could get from _Rebecca_ in a month's serious study.

"Looked to be a little something less than love between Valerie and the great Miss McCoy. Anything there?"

"This one I figured out for myself," Betty told me. "Naturally, I recognized Josie straight off, but after a while, I could place Val too. They were in a singing group together, the Pussycats, before Josie charged off on her own. The third girl, Melody, has since moved out of Riverdale with a young family. Val mentioned that in passing as the pair of them still exchange frequent letters."

"Valerie Brown definitely never achieved her old pal's success. Maybe hasn't had her options either. So the green-eyed woman makes another gal with a reason for jealousy."

"On more scores than one; our hostess here married the fellow Val used to go with. I don't think she's really sore about that though, I just see a tempest behind her eyes when Veronica gushes too long over Archie."

I gave the hair under the back of my hat a good scritch in an attempt to further stimulate my brain. There was something… if I could just see it. At the moment, tracking these motivations was like trying to figure out the path the wind had taken through the branches of a tree, with everything swaying at once.

"The poetry?" I asked, while I stood in line at my brain's deli counter, waiting for a roast or even a thin, stringy steak of brilliance to be handed across.

"Val's a songwriter. She thought up every word the Pussycats ever sang together. She told me once that poetry's an interest of hers because that and songwriting sort of go hand in hand."

At the mention of hands, I laid mine along my wife's cheek and smiled at her. Betty could never resist smiling back.

"Anything else you've uncovered which I would have no way of knowing without you, dear?"

She blushed.

"We're a team," she reminded me, "but yes, there is one other thing." A wry smile, well-deserved, from the missus. "Josie was once quite close with Cheryl. Around the time of the big Pussycat split, I understand. Cheryl floated on over her like a blanket, comforting, until Josie realized she was blocking out the sun and making it hard to breathe."

"Cheryl became controlling," I parsed, smirking at the way Betty and I had switched styles. It was tempting to think of us as one mind, working together, but for the fact that, if we were just a mind, Betty Jones would be without that miraculous body. Unacceptable, I thought, running a hand over her backside. She caught my wrist and returned it to me like the scruff of a pesky neighbourhood cat that sneaks in and roots up the garden.

"I take it that the reason you're filling your hands is because your mind's already full up? What've you got, Jug?"

"Come on with me, honey, and watch the prosecutor work the courtroom."

I led her back into the den of deception―walking in front was the only proven method I'd found for keeping my eyes on my destination instead of tripping over my own foolish feet watching Betty move like she was being painted through the air. Couldn't blow my credibility, or her game of pretend, to hell now. Betty assisted me, retaking her seat and shrugging to Val like they were all innocent audience members at a magic show. No plant in the crowd. Just an ordinary set of steel rings, folks, right? _Clang, clang_.

"Is there anyone else you need to interview?" inquired Veronica, sitting up stiffly like an unripe banana.

"Nah," I said, casual as you like.

"So…" she went on, waiting the way they waited for the first telephone call across the Atlantic, unsure if there was anything coming. "Will you be returning tomorrow to ask more questions? Or, should we give you our cards so that you might contact us individually?"

"Thank you for that doubt, Mrs. Andrews. If only my clients' not infrequent attempts to humble me had any chance of success." I sighed. "Still, I appreciate the effort."

"You don't mean you've figured it out already," Cheryl accused. I frowned at her, like the first frown the wild grizzly gives in the spring that he's been storing up all winter.

"Of course he has," Ethel snapped at her. "He already said he was honest."

"Flattery? Is that part of your scheme now?" Cheryl wondered, rolling her eyes until they landed in the position they would always return to, like a pair of loaded dice.

"Hold the squabbling, ladies," I requested, walking up to the chair Veronica had left vacant for me and folding my arms over its back like a nosy neighbour kid hanging slack-shouldered over the fence. "I understand the two of you have a history, but you never know what can happen over the years… how a person can change." A look went around the group like a hot potato. "This is a club of discussion; any thoughts on that, Ms. McCoy?"

For maybe the first time in her life, Josie―wartime star, former Pussycat―opened her mouth and nothing came out. I wasn't expecting her to confess to the tune of a Cole Porter song, but utter speechlessness was certainly something.

"You've known these gals for a long time, Josephine. Went to school together, shared the same teenage highs and lows." I flapped my hand like a table tennis paddle. "You, above anyone here… No," I stopped her before she could speak, "―let me get my compliment out. "You know the intricacies of a female acquaintanceship. How to navigate that. How to subdue it. How to make it worse," I suggested. "You knew what would happen if you chose Ethel as the recipient of your phony letters, how it would roil things up between her and Miss Blossom. What a mess it would make. That someone, at some point, would demand that action be taken, if only to shut these two up."

I jerked my thumb at them to yelps of indignation.

"That is entirely ridiculous," Josie began, prim and very, very calm.

"Oh, I wouldn't call you ridiculous," I teased. "You played the game well, to a point. Only, you hoped that Ethel would go to the cops or straight to the paper and cause a stink fouler than an upriver garbage dump in July. You hoped that somebody a little stupider and a little more reverent than I am, or maybe two or three of them, would come barging in here taking statements and stand dumbfounded at the sight of _the_ Josie McCoy. And if they didn't do that, well, you'd have time to remind them of who you are as you are questioned, just as a formality, then interviewed, then featured, then televised, until somehow, you are slap in the public eye again."

"I see the drama you're trying to construct here, Detective, but I like my quiet life," she protested.

"You like it so quiet that, rather than having the odd holiday to drop in on old friends, you permanently move back to Riverdale and join a weekly book club? That kind of commitment speaks to me louder than you do, and it's saying you've got a lot of time on your hands. You're not the only American who wishes the war was still going, Josie, but I'd bet you're in the minority."

"I don't know what this town has done to you to get you so mixed up," she countered, "but it has only ever been kind to me."

"Take off those gloves and swear it on the Bible," I dared. Immediately, Josie clenched her hands together. Valerie glared at her.

"Do what the man says," Valerie told her. "I always liked you better when you didn't play the diva."

Josie tore at her gloves like they were caught in a thorn bush instead of the fingers of her fine, small hands and flung them on the table next to _Rebecca_. I watched her stare into her own lap and breathe hard, then she turned her palms up.

"Thickest edition of the week, that Sunday paper," I tsked. "And it looks like you go to work on it as soon as it lands on your doorstep; I can see the ink was still wet when you were assembling Ethel's next letter this morning." She appeared near tears and I always felt bad when they did that, especially the fairer sex. If only they didn't get themselves into these messes in the first place. "There'll be more publicity coming your way than you thought, eh, Josephine?"

"Don't be cruel to her."

I raised an eyebrow. It was Muggsy who'd spoken.

"Relax," I urged her, "this isn't an electrocuting offence." That scared them both pretty good. Like magic, the power the right words have.

"It isn't _any_ offense," Ethel persisted, leaning to grab her harasser's now ungloved hand. "I heard what you said: it was never about me at all."

"Is that how you felt over, what did you say, the past month and a half as those letters kept on coming? Would you tell me now that Josie's deliberately plotted hatefulness―even if it was flimsy as a mirage―had no effect on your happiness or sense of personal safety?"

Ethel stared into Josie's eyes long enough that I straightened up just to listen to the sound of my back cracking rather than stew in their dictated silence.

"I'm telling you exactly that. There's no problem here."

I snorted, feigned bafflement.

"There are other ways," Valerie said to Josie with a sigh. "If you weren't so set on being alone at the top, you might see you'd have a few more friends, admirers even, than you thought you did."

"Beautiful," quoth I, from the depths of my snarky heart. "A morning wasted. The one benefit is that I'm done in time for lunch."

The woman of the house, tired of me, gestured me towards the door without standing. The fine habits of the rich.

"You'll be paid. I'll have Smithers deliver your cheque."

"Right," I said, swinging open the door. "I'll make sure my butler's at his post to receive it."

Veronica managed to send a knowing smile quickly my way before I was out, like she'd caught the fastest current. That was no good. Worse than someone sniffing out my methods was someone who tried to make friends. I stomped down the stairs to avoid spoiling myself with a second ride in the golden elevator. The building really wasn't so high.

Five minutes later, Betty emerged to find me loitering around the corner of the Pembrooke, outside of Smithers' scope.

"Why don't you let people know how great you are?" she demanded.

"It's selling out, not like with money, but selling out just the same."

My wife shook her head at me like she had already known what I was going to say because we'd been living together for 50 years, 500 maybe, instead of just the 5. The partnership, the cracking of codes and crimes, went back further than that.

"How about a milkshake for the sweetest detective the world will never know?" She smiled and the word 'sweet' lost all meaning in comparison. I took her chin and kissed her soft.

"Yes, but only if you're treating."

And off we strolled under a sun like a spotlight, perhaps the same as we ever had been, here in the town of our childhood.


End file.
